"Primeval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... early history of Denmark might be read through its monuments, and has been translated and applied to the history of similar remains in England, in the hope that it will be found a useful hand-book for the use of those who desire to know something of the nature of the numerous primeval monuments scattered over these Islands, and the light which their investigation is likely to throw over the earliest and most obscure periods of ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.22 • Various
... aware of eternity and darkness and loneliness. The sun was a hot, bright disc, but it illuminated nothing. All that his mind clung to for identification of itself and the universe around it was gone. He was like a primeval cell, floating without ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... crosses the horizon, while near at hand one bell of a foxglove swings to and fro with a bumble-bee for clapper. These white Cornish cottages are built on the edge of the cliff; the garden grows gorse more readily than cabbages; and for hedge, some primeval man has piled granite boulders. In one of these, to hold, an historian conjectures, the victim's blood, a basin has been hollowed, but in our time it serves more tamely to seat those tourists who wish for an uninterrupted ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... when no surface supply will be considered satisfactory unless the water is filtered. The only alternative is water gathered from areas that are owned by the individual and on which, therefore, all dwellings may be prohibited, all cultivated land avoided, and where the primeval forest may be restored, making the watershed equal to that from which ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... these same people in their rude villages. There are towns far away, unconnected by any road, to reach which the traveller must journey wearily by horse and on foot, over boulder-strewn paths, by the side of roaring torrents, through the cool depths of primeval forests, and over the snow-clad spurs of rugged mountains. There he will find men accustomed to face death at any moment, who delight in giving hospitality, and who talk of other lands as "the world outside." These are the Montenegrins to ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... over the sunny field. He saw the golden dust float nearer up the slope, saw the brave flags unfurling in the breeze—saw, at last, man after man emerge from the yellow cloud. As he bent to fire, the fury of the game swept over him and aroused the sleeping brute within him. All the primeval instincts, throttled by the restraint of centuries—the instincts of bloodguiltiness, of hot pursuit, of the fierce exhilaration of the chase, of the death grapple with a resisting foe—these awoke suddenly to life and turned the battle scarlet to ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... frailties of his sex, holding experiences in his past that had left him far from a puritan. And she was a woman, of unschooled impulses, with unsuspected banked passions, an innocent creature in whom primeval physical life rioted. ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... One makes the excuse for him that he was but three-and-twenty, that, framed in the purple moonlight, she seemed to him the most beautiful creature his eyes had ever seen. And then there was the brooding mystery of it all, that atmosphere of far-off primeval times from which the roots of life still draw their sap. One takes it he forgot that he was Flight Commander Raffleton, officer and gentleman; forgot the proper etiquette applying to the case of ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... family of Graham can be traced back in unbroken succession to the beginning of the twelfth century; and indeed there have been attempts to encumber its scutcheon with the quarterings of a fabulous antiquity. Gram, we are told, was in some primeval time the generic name for all independent leaders of men, and was borne by one of the earliest kings of Denmark. Another has surmised that if Graham be the proper spelling of the name, it may be compounded of Gray and Ham, the dwelling, ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... the sea is quieter there are few who can resist the desire to plunge into the blue waters, for at seven o'clock the shore is so entirely deserted that one seems to be bathing from some primeval shore where no other forms of life may be expected than some giant crustaceans. This thought, perhaps, prompted the painful sensations I allowed to prey upon me one night when I was walking along this particular piece ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... Veritable offsprings of Nature, knowing naught of social conventions and restraints, they loved one another in all innocence and guilelessness. They mated even as the birds of the air mate, even as youth and maid mated in primeval times, because such is Nature's law. At sixteen Cadine was a dusky town gipsy, greedy and sensual, whilst Marjolin, now eighteen, was a tall, strapping fellow, as handsome a youth as could be met, but still with his mental ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... they were obliged to ride so close that their shoulders touched. It was the full of the moon, but in the forest there was only an occasional splash of silver. They might have fancied themselves alone in primeval solitude had it not been for the gay voices behind them. And never had Delfina been so enchanting. She even talked a little, but her accomplished coquetry needed few words. She could express more by a bend of the head or an inflection of the voice than other women could accomplish ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... all manner of difficulties attached to it. Perhaps no direct road to and from any city on the world's surface is subject to sharper fatigue while it lasts. Journeying by this route also, the traveller leaves San Jose mounted on his mule, and so mounted he makes his way through the vast primeval forests down to the banks of the Serapiqui river. That there is a track for him is of course true; but it is simply a track, and during nine months of the twelve is so deep in mud that the mules sink in it to their bellies. Then, when the river has been ...
— Returning Home • Anthony Trollope
... keenly the swift motion of their flight. Why not? The sea, the winds of heaven, had aided others since the dawn of history. Legend was eternally true. On these very shores happiness had awaited those who had dared to face primeval things. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... forces barred his way. Unseen hands seemed to draw him back. No one would go near now to gather the cocoa-nuts, and they lay rotting on the ground. Everywhere was desolation. The bush was encroaching, and it looked as though very soon the primeval forest would regain possession of that strip of land which had been snatched from it at the cost of so much labour. He had the sensation that here was the abode of pain. As he approached the house he was struck by the unearthly silence, and at first he thought ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... who have been led to believe that the Vedas of the ancient Brahmans, the Avesta of the Zoroastrians, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, the Kings of Confucius, or the Koran of Mohammed are books full of primeval wisdom and religious enthusiasm or at least of sound and simple moral teaching, will be disappointed on consulting these volumes.... I cannot help calling attention to the real mischief that has been done, and is still being done, by ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... inclination of spirit than matter, but still she accepted his support and walked along easily at his side. So far from her resenting his summary taking of her hand, she was grateful, with the humble gratitude of the primeval woman for the kindness of a master whom she has ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... us; those stately natural pillars—a glorious phalanx of royal trees, bearing at such sublime heights vivid green masses of foliage, through which no single sun-ray penetrated, while at our feet babbled the primeval brook, over smooth pebbles, in soft tones befitting the sacred quiet of the scene! Who could have desecrated this solemn, holy harmony of nature? But just as I was thinking it impossible that any man could be tempted to disturb the serene ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... replied Mr. Waterman. "I want to come here again several times before the summer is over, for when we get to the top of this mountain you will see something that very few city dwellers have ever seen, namely, a real primeval forest." ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... were well known to the boatmen, and were hailed as the Revenue Cutter of the stream. As we sailed rapidly down the river, shut in between two mounds of earth, the sounds of this timber rolled down the bank enhanced the silence and vastness of the noon, and we fancied that only the primeval echoes were awakened. The vision of a distant scow just heaving in sight round a headland also increased ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... of the grain. The thicket rising gradually in height, but with a regular slope whose gradient had been determined by centuries of western trade winds, presently becomes a fair wood of live-oak, and a few hundred yards further at last assumes the aspect of a primeval forest. A delicious coolness fills the air; the long, shadowy aisles greet the aching eye with a soothing twilight; the murmur of unseen brooks is heard, and, by a strange irony, the enormous, widely-spaced stacks ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... entangled in one another and been held fast. Or it was like a mass of blackened skeletons of drowned giants which the pool wanted to throw up on the land. Arms and legs writhed about one another, the long fingers dug deep into the very cliff to get a hold, the mighty ribs formed arches, which held up primeval trees. It had happened, however, that the iron arms, the steel-like fingers with which the pines held themselves fast, had given way, and a pine had been borne by a mighty north wind from the top of the cliff down into the pool. It had burrowed deep down into the ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... ceased to sing after they had marched but a very little way; and indeed the trail, apart from the apparently growing weight of the pack, was not favourable to song. There was no sort of path whatever after they had left the river bank; nothing but the primeval forest, with an undergrowth that was so dense that the branches of one bush were often interwoven with its neighbours. Through this they had to force their way, head down, hands and clothes suffering ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... yet there is still an abundance left. Whitney speaks of the region as abounding in oak of various kinds, chestnut, white ash, beech, birch, and maple, with some butternut and walnut trees. The vigorous growth of the primeval forest indicated the strength and richness of the soil which has since been turned to such profitable use by the farmers. The houses in which the people live are all substantial, convenient, and, in many cases, beautiful, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... grey rock and brown heather and single bald peaks rising sentinel-like in the waste. The grey heavens lent a chill eeriness to the dim grey distances; the sharp winds, the forerunners of snow, blew over the moors like blasts from a primeval night. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... on a page, and it would be better if most of those lines were not there at all. Either Mr. Crane is insulting the public or insulting himself, or he has developed a case of atavism and is chattering the primeval nonsense of the apes. His "Black Riders," uneven as it was, was a casket of polished masterpieces when compared with "War Is Kind." And it is not kind at all, Mr. Crane; when it provokes such verses as these, it is all that Sherman said ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... they can do but what their old fathers did when gazing up to the eternal sky, and feeling the presence of a Being as far as far, and as near as near can be; they can but combine the self-same words and utter once more the primeval Aryan prayer, Heaven-Father, in that form which will endure for ever, 'Our Father, which art ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... mist enshrouds the rocks, Shattered in earth's primeval shocks, And niggard Nature ever mocks The ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... the Beginning, and in the centre void presently there came a nucleus of light: and the light brightened in the grey primeval morning and became definite and articulate. And from the midst of that natal splendour, behind which was the Unknowable, the life came hitherward; from the midst of that nucleus undescribed, undescribable, there issued presently the primeval sigh that breathed the breath of ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... richest dealer, Mulai Hassan, eyed the gem and coolly Said, 'The thing is but a common tumbler-bottom, nothing more!' Whereupon, the King's Assassin drew his sword, and Mulai Hassan Never peddled rings again upon the Nile's primeval shore." ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... I read the other day," said Mrs. Graves, "stated that men ought to do primeval things, eat under-done beef, sleep in their clothes, drink too much, kill things. It sounds disgusting; but I suppose ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... In primeval times, a maiden, Beauteous Daughter of the Ether, Passed for ages her existence In the great expanse of heaven, O'er the prairies yet enfolded. Wearisome the maiden growing, Her existence sad and hopeless, Thus alone to live for ages In the infinite expanses Of the air above the sea-foam, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... sustenance from all good things it is clearly understood as the product of civilisation, with its complex problems and scientific appliances, not as the elementary possession of the noble savage, which has been traced so often to the primeval forest. On the other hand, if sin not only tends to impair, but does inevitably impair and hinder it, providence is excluded from its own mysterious sphere, which, as it is not the suppression of all evil and present punishment ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Reason cannot be brought to bear to show The ways whereby may be created these Great crags of basalt and the during iron; For their whole nature will profoundly lack The first foundations of a solid frame. But powerful in old simplicity, Abide the solid, the primeval germs; And by their combinations more condensed, All objects can be tightly knit and bound And made to show unconquerable strength. Again, since all things kind by kind obtain Fixed bounds of growing and conserving life; Since Nature hath inviolably decreed What each can do, what each ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... high spirits. The novelty of the trip, the rude shanty, with its litter of shavings, and its boxes for chairs, the bundles of hay for beds, gave her something like the same pleasure a picnic might have done. It appealed to the primeval in her. She forgot her homesickness and her vague regrets, and her smiles ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... brought from the Old World that primeval gloomy Shaman religion, or sorcery, such as is practiced yet by Laplanders and Tartars, such as formed the basis of the old Accadian Babylonian cultus, and such as is now in vogue among all our own red Indians. I believe that it was ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines. This is the gift ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... risen o'er earth's first nature; Though love illumed each individual mind, Like some half-blind, half-formed primeval creature The State still ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... force by force; on that strategic scheme of cutting Saint-Antoine in two halves: he answers what he can: they think it were right to send this strategic National Commandant to the Abbaye Prison, and let a Court of Law decide on him. Alas, a Court of Law, not Book-Law but primeval Club-Law, crowds and jostles out of doors; all fretted to the hysterical pitch; cruel as Fear, blind as the Night: such Court of Law, and no other, clutches poor Mandat from his constables; beats him down, massacres ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... What we understand by primeval forest is but seldom seen in the interior here, though the country cannot be described otherwise than as generally covered with interminable forests. Insects kill or dwarf some trees, and men maim others for the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... had fancied that he was alone in the house. It seemed not, however. There was a primeval piano in his sitting-room, and on the second morning it suited his mood to sit down at this and sing 'Asthore', the fruity pathos of which ballad appealed to him strongly at this time, accompanying himself by an ingenious arrangement in three chords. He had hardly begun, however, ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... lifting and setting down his heavy-booted feet with a softness of which he had never guessed himself capable. He began to forget his indignation and think only of the prospect of bagging the game—so easily do the primeval instincts spring to life in a man's brain. Presently, when within about a hundred yards of the place where he hoped to get a fair shot, Coxen redoubled his caution. He went crouching, keeping behind the densest cover. Then, growing still more crafty, ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... regulated and controlled by the hand of man, must have been, in its original and primeval state, of a very peculiar character. It must have consisted of such plants only as could exist under the condition of having the soil in Which they grew laid, for a quarter of the year, wholly under water. This circumstance, probably, prevented ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... one and many, of the finite and infinite, of the intelligible and sensible, of the unchangeable and the changing, of the indivisible and the divisible, of the fixed stars and the planets, of the creative mind and the primeval chaos. These pairs of opposites are so many aspects of the great opposition between ideas and phenomena—they easily pass into one another; and sometimes the two members of the relation differ in kind, sometimes only in degree. As in Aristotle's matter and form the connexion ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... ranging to 120 deg., and with such rapid alternations. In Canada, also, man really conquers the earth by the sweat of his brow; for there is no harder labour than the preparation of timber, and the subduing of a primeval forest in a ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... on through its solemn canyons in primeval freedom, unvexed by the tampering and meddling of man. The Spaniards, after the picturesque conquest of the luckless Aztecs, were eagerly searching for new fields of profitable battle, and then they dreamed of finding among the mysteries ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... strong, thrilling, brilliant things which are better worth reading the second time than the first. Entertaining stories we have in plenty; but this is something more—it is a piece of literature. At the same time it is an unforgettable picture of the whole wild, thrilling, desperate, vigorous, primeval life of the Klondike regions in the years after the gold fever set in. It ranks beside the best things of its kind in ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... mysterious, almost uncanny, in the life-like reproduction of themselves and their boats, their bits of cottages, and their bare-footed bairns—in the painted glimpses of the broad-billowed ocean; and the desolate old hills, with such forlorn lights on their scarps, as the gloom of primeval tempests might have cast. ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... things that were right—that was the invitation that He gave to me out of my conscious weakness and want. I will not repeat the scene of that morning when light broke fairly on my mind; how one might have thought that I was a lunatic escaped from confinement; how I ran up and down through the primeval forest of Ohio, shouting, 'Glory, glory!' sometimes in loud tones and at other times whispered in an ecstasy of joy and surprise. All the old troubles gone, and light breaking in on my mind, I cried: 'I have found my God; ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... it himself and everything connected with it from stumpage to scantling. "There is a broad stream that runs into the lake, ... and above the mill there are bass weighing ten pounds, ... and back in the primeval forest bears, ... and now and then a moose—" So ran the letter. Muggles had spread it wide open by this time and was reading it aloud—everybody knowing Monteith—and the group never having any secrets of ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... means certain what was the name by which Long Island was known to the aboriginal dwellers in its "forest primeval," or indeed that they ever had a common name by which to designate it. It seems probable that each tribe bestowed upon it a different name, expressive of the aspect that appeared most striking to its primitive and poetical visitors and occupants. Among so ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... bodies dangling within the shadowy cupboard of his eye. Of course we got no further. Additional opposition but further enraged him. He recapitulated what he would no doubt call his arguments,—they sounded more like threats,—and as he spoke I saw dragons fighting for their dams in the primeval ooze, and heard savage trumpetings of masculine monsters without ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains. There are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures; forests—vast and primeval; and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all industries—cotton, iron and wood—that region has easy control. In cotton, a fixed monopoly—in iron, proven ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... its height. It fills me with amazement now to think that I should have dared to follow such a horror into the bowels of the earth, but when one's blood is up, and when one's quarry seems to be flying, the old primeval hunting-spirit awakes and prudence is cast to the wind. Rifle in hand, I ran at the top of my speed upon the trail ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull, for man's brutal sport? But if we give up the principle in one case; if we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in order, for instance, that the greyhound, that perfect image of symmetry and vigor, might be formed; no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations, alike in nature and the results of the same general laws, which have ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... of the building ceased. Insensibly I seemed to see the hewn stones of the walls assume their primeval and untouched state beneath the grasses of the hills. I could feel the rafters vanishing and going back into the bodies of the oaks in which they originally grew. The voice of the organ remained with me, but it might ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... and destructive on the eastern low grounds,—had not the Frankfurters built an 'Oder-Dam' on that side; a broad strong Earth-mound, running for many miles, and confining its floods. Beyond the Dam there are traces of an 'Old Oder (ALTE ODER);' and, in fact, Oder, in primeval and in recent time, has gone along, many-streamed; indenting, quarrying, leaving lakelets, quagmires, miscellaneous sandy tumult, at a great rate, on that eastern shore. Making of it one of the unloveliest scenes of chaotic desolation anywhere to be met with;—fallen ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... human gore, Gods hiss from caverns or in cages roar, Nile pours from heaven a tutelary flood, And gardens grow the vegetable god. Two rival powers the magian faith inspire, Primeval Darkness and immortal Fire; Evil and good in these contending rise, And each by turns the sovereign of the skies. Sun, stars and planets round the earth behold Their fanes of marble and their shrines of gold; The sea, the grove, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... when the carriage entered the long avenue, bordered with velvety grass and primeval elms, and at the end Savigny awaiting her with ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... Vaucheria among algae, the moss, the fern, and the flowering plant, a similarity which becomes the more marked the more the details of each case and of the cases of plants which form links between these great classes are studied, points to a community of origin of all plants in some few or one primeval ancestor. And to this inference the study of plant structure and morphology, together with the evidence of palaeobotany among other circumstances, lends confirmatory evidence, and all modern discoveries, as for instance that of the rudimentary prothallium formed by the pollen of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... a Divine Reason. Nature could only be understood from its highest forms; the Ideal, which revealed itself to the world of men at their highest development, was present, in possibility and intent, in the first germ, in the mist of primeval creation, before it divided itself into organic and inorganic elements. The whole of Nature was in its essence Divine, and I felt myself at heart a worshipper ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... river-scenery. Some are inhabited by maniacal fishermen, who sit day after day all day long at the end of poles protruding from front or back doors or bedroom windows. Some are inhabited by Londoners in whom primeval instincts for air, space, sunshine, and liberty break out every summer from under the thick crust of modern habits and conventions and cause them to breathe, as we did, not angelical aspirations, but "I want to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... 1918.—At seven this morning a few of us went out shooting with Prince Leopold of Bavaria. We went for a distance of 20 to 30 kilometres by train, and then in open automobiles to a magnificent primeval forest extending over two to three hundred square kilometres. Weather very cold, but fine, much snow, and pleasant company. From the point of view of sport, it was poorer than one could have expected. One of the Prince's ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... of to-day as part of their own lives, girls of the twentieth century may well look back through the long ages to women's work in the past.[1] The study of anthropology appears to indicate that in primeval ages women began the textile industry and, possibly, agriculture. There seems to be no doubt that they were primitive architects, and that they tamed some of the smaller domestic animals. They had most to do with the preparation of food and may have introduced the use of herbs and medicines. ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... out your little part; but think what has happened where you are now sitting so calmly reading! What tumultuous, crowding events! Your room is quiet now, but its space has rung with war-cries; the ground under you has been drenched with blood; and further back it was lush with primeval jungle; and in another age it was frozen beneath a great ice-cap; and before that it blazed, molten with ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... centuries done to this gateway of American civilization? Surely not very much. Keeping one's eyes in the right direction it was easy to blot out three hundred years, and to feel that we were looking upon about the same scene that those first colonists beheld—just the primeval waste of rolling waters, lonely marsh, ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... granite round with reachless snows. Stand for Eternity while pilgrim rows Of all the nations envy thy repose. Ensheath thy swart sublimities, unscaled. Be that alone on earth which has not failed. Be that which never yet has yearned or ailed, But since primeval Power upreared thy heights Has stood above all ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... back and forth, and day after day is repeated the merry dance of many skaters—about the only kind of dance I thoroughly believe in. If I stand on the porch upon which one of my library windows opens, and look to the east, I see the mountain clad with its primeval forest, crowding down to the water's edge. It looks as though one might naturally expect to come upon a camp of Indian wigwams there. Two years ago a wild-cat was shot in those same woods and stuffed by the hunters, and it still stands in ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... of London. 9. A considerable portion of the United States yet remains to be surveyed, but no portion remains unexplored. There are doubtless large tracts of forest and mountain land which are in primeval wildness, but the general topography is known. In Alaska, however, there are thousands of square miles which have never been visited by a white man, mainly in the interior; in fact, with the exception of a strip of sea-coast and the lands bordering on ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... held, in the very magnificence of superstitions, we see the traits of a noble national character. It would be difficult to show absolute degradation at any time among these people. How they came to have these grand traits in their primeval forests it is difficult to show. Certainly they were never such a people as the Africans or the Malay races, or even the Slavonic tribes. These natural elements of character extorted the admiration of Tacitus, even as the Orientals won the respect of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the Germans, and those enjoying a considerable authority) are chargeable with the very procedure of which they accuse the philosopher—introducing a priori inventions of their own into the records of the past. It is, for example, a widely current fiction that there was an original primeval people, taught directly by God, endowed with perfect insight and wisdom, possessing a thorough knowledge of all natural laws and spiritual truth; that there have been such or such sacerdotal peoples; or, to mention ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... high road is for the most part highly cultivated, and would give a stranger an over-favourable idea of it, for but a short distance off on either side of it, especially as it advances north, dense jungles and forests are to be found in a primeval state, full of wild beasts of every description. The island is about 270 miles long and 145 wide. It is divided into five provinces—Central, Southern, ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... which indeed formed the chief material of the Island of Mull. This basaltic cliff now fronts the Atlantic, and resists its waves like a rock of iron. To see all the delicate veins and stalklets, and exact forms of what had once been the green fresh foliage of a remotely primeval forest, thus brought to light again, as preserved in their clay envelope, after they had lain for ages and ages under what must have been the molten outburst of some tremendous volcanic discharge, and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... remembrance of the history of St. John's death may have had an influence on this occasion, we would leave learned theologians to decide. It is only of importance here to add that in Abyssinia, a country entirely separated from Europe, where Christianity has maintained itself in its primeval simplicity against Mahomedanism, John is to this day worshipped, as protecting saint of those who are attacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of the dominion of mysticism and superstition, historical connection is not to ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... do not declare the glory of God any more than do shining eyes, nor the firmament show His handiwork more than the woven wind of hair, for these were wrought with no lesser love than set the young stars swimming in seas of joyous and primeval air. If we drink in the beauty of the night or the mountains, it is deemed to be praise of the Maker, but if we show an equal adoration of the beauty of man or woman, it is dangerous, it is almost wicked. Of course it ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... one of the stillest, clearest days of 'St. Luke's little summer,' the last afternoon of her visit at the Holt, there stood Honora, leaning against a tree stem, deep, very deep in a vision of the primeval woodlands of the West, their red inhabitants, and the white man who should carry the true, glad tidings westward, westward, ever from east to west. Did she know how completely her whole spirit and soul were surrendered to the worship of that devotion? Worship? Yes, the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shrieked. "What an awful end! don't you understand? Devils! devils!" and he slipped from his chair suddenly on to the hearthrug, and lay there tearing at it with his fingers. The elegant fribble of St. James' Street had passed back to the primeval savage robbed of ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... responsibility to bear. Arnold's march from the east, through the forests of Maine, was known to be aimed directly at Quebec, but the Canadians of that day, who understood all the hardships and perils of winter in the primeval woods, had no idea that Arnold's column would ever reach its destination. And, as we shall see, in the next book, when describing the principal episodes of this heroic march, there was every good ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... shores were beautiful with semitropical verdure, while in the distance the country rose from the ocean in hill and tableland, almost uniformly clothed by primeval forest. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Creator, and he is the highest state of blessedness. Learned persons versed in the scriptures attain to great happiness by knowing him. In that spot are the celestial Rishis, the Siddhas, and, indeed, all the Rishis,—where dwelleth the slayer of Madhu, that primeval Deity and mighty Yogin! Let no doubt enter thy heart that that spot is the foremost of all holy spots. These, O lord of earth, are the tirthas and sacred spots on earth, that I have recited, O best of men! These all are visited by the Vasus, the Sadhyas, the Adityas, the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in her face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... of redwoods and pine, only the soft footfalls of the unshod mustang or the sudden cry of the wild-cat breaking the primeval silence. It was night when Dona Brigida abruptly dismounted, dragging Pilar with her. They were halfway up a rocky height, surrounded by towering peaks black with rigid trees. Just in front of them was an opening in the ascending wall. Beside ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... of the first quality. It climbs with its sharp-curved claws, not by hugging, as is the case with the bear tribe. Its lair, or place of retreat, is in a tree—some hollow, with its entrance high up. Such trees are common in the great primeval forests of America. In this tree-cave it has its nest, where the female brings forth three, four, five, or six "cubs" at a birth. This takes place in early spring—usually ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... recurring needs. It was, in all probability, often made and as often lost again, until a growing habit of venturing beyond shore or river bank in search of better fishing, or of using the easy open waterways through the thick tangle of a primeval forest to reach fresh hunting grounds, established ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... was a primeval stronghold before the Spanish Conquest, and a town of some importance to the white race when Pennsylvania was a wilderness and the first Dutch governor of New York was slowly drilling the Knickerbocker ancestry in their difficult ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... the open meadows beyond the tracks and up at the great star. The meadows, sloping to an horizon hill, were even and white, as if an end of sky had been pulled down and spread upon them. Utter peace was there, not the primeval peace that is negation, but a silence ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... still shine and awe the superstitious, and so great is the fame of the place that many pilgrims come yearly from distant India to pray, and to have prayers said for them, here in the visible presence of the primeval light. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Oregon was an untrodden wilderness. The transformation of that primeval territory into prosperous communities enjoying the highest degree of civilization could not have been accomplished without the work of women. No restriction should be placed upon energies and abilities so potent for good. The extension of the right of suffrage would remove ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... humanity has been an unbroken progress toward perfection; you may maintain that there has been no progress at all, and that man remains the same poor creature that he ever was; or, lastly, you may say, with the author of the "Contract Social," that men were purest and best in primeval simplicity,— ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... little farm-house in the ravine in the fall of 1863 there fell with the sinking moon these solemn dirges of the great dark woods. The stars brightened their crowns till Via Lactea shone a highway of silver dust or as the shadow of that primeval river rolling across the blue champaign of heaven. The depths of repose that follow the enjoyment of the young irrigated their limbs, filling the sensuous nerves and arteries with a delicious narcotism—a deep, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... alone can add the Master's degree to the usual conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... all-composing hour Resistless falls: the Muse obeys the power. She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold Of Night primeval and of Chaos old! Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away. Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. As one by one, at ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... hooded torches of cave dwellers sheltering from enemies and the storm in those perpendicular fastnesses. Far down, a red sphere glowed dimly, exalting the illusion. He almost fancied he could see the out-posts of primeval forests bending over the canyon and wondered why the "Poet of Manhattan" had never immortalized a scene at once so ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... take, every clamour they raise here, is a stroke and is disgrace for them over there that have murdered us and ruined my own dear land." His face worked convulsively; I was in the presence of one of the primeval passions. But he grew calm immediately after. "You want Separation for reasons of your own. I don't ask what they are. No doubt you and your crony Macdonald and the rest of them will feather your own nests; I ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... depths of his slow brain had a thirst for knowledge and at the same time a certain assurance that he would never acquire any. His slow voice, his slow smile, the great, heavy back, the short thick legs attracted Olva; there was something simple and primeval here that appealed to the Dune blood. Moreover, since the afternoon when Olva had played against the Harlequins and covered himself with glory, Lawrence had shown a disposition to make friends. Old Lawrence might be stupid, but, as a background, he was the most important man in the College. ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... sacred of old to the Starry Queen, and a reviving breath sweeps from the blue sea, calling up in ruined fane, and on the green turf where once stood temples in the olden time, fresh ideals of those forms of ineffable beauty, faun and fay, born of the primeval myth. There is already a quivering in the ancient graves, and strange lights flicker over the mighty stones consecrated by tradition to incantations, not of morbid fears, but of the strong and beautiful in nature. For in the Utilitarianism, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Creek is its water-lilies, which cover the surface everywhere, so that a boat has often to cut its way through their mass. On either hand, side-creeks can be seen twisting among the trees and running deeper into the heart of the forest. The silence of the primeval solitude is unbroken save when a canoe passes, and then a startled alligator will slip into the water, monkeys will scurry chattering from branch to branch, parrots will fly screaming away, blue kingfishers and wild ducks will disappear from ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... by the innocence of the dove. If, therefore, he sees the reign of prejudice and corruption, so firmly established, that men would be offended with the genuine simplicity of the Gospel, and the purity of its primeval doctrines, he may so far moderate their rigour as to prevent them from entirely disgusting weak and luxurious minds. If we cannot effect the greatest possible perfection, it is still a material point to preserve from the grossest vices. A physician that practises ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... creature which is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever to many estimable people—I reserve my judgment. Some otherwise calm and moral men regard the cat in such a light that they would go and jump on the tomb of the primeval tamer; others would erect monuments to him; so perhaps it is better that we do not know whose memory we should revere—or anathematise—the processes are reversible, according to our dispositions. Man is the paragon of ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... wealth untold; they towered rich and care-free and squandered their treasures with glorious unconcern. Why not? There was plenty left. Oh, no, our present-day authors are clever and sensible; they do not show us, as did the old, a flood, a tempest, a red eruption of flame-tongued, primeval power!" ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... window ajar, so that Pomp could not get it open in the morning. And there I was, too much excited by the ideas of the trip to get to sleep. For as I lay there I could picture the little river winding in and out among the great trees of the primeval forest, and see it here black as night flowing sluggishly beneath the drooping moss-hung trees, there dancing in the sunshine that rained down from above, and then on and on in amongst the mysterious shades where in all probability the foot of man ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... Jess, as she sank back upon the dirty skins, that, had it not been for the old clothes and the wreck of the American clock, she would have made acquaintance with a very fair example of the dwellings of primeval man. ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... beautiful was that the rector's horse was beautiful, and that the curate's horse was picturesque. [Laughter.] I simply mean that a small holding is more picturesque than a large holding, and I think we may hope that the parish councils, if they meet, as they did in primeval times, under the shade of some large spreading oak, and not in the public house which we so much fear, as their headquarters, may yet add a picturesque feature to the rural landscape of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... but had met not a soul. All was delightful and picturesque, the profusion of wild flowers, the huge grey moss-grown boulders, the overhanging ilexes and olives, and the music of the tumbling current through a crooked course worn deep by the waters of primeval ages. ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... numerous progeny called the Oceanides, who are said to have been three thousand in number. He alone, of all the Titans, refrained from taking part against Zeus in the Titanomachia, and was, on that account, the only one of the primeval divinities permitted to retain his dominion under ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... in the chase, or the hunt? Allow me to differ; people always must hunt something, don't you know; primeval instinct! Used to hunt one another," he laughed. "Sometimes do now. Fox is only a substitute for the joys of the man-hunt; sort of sop to Cerberus, as it were. ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... the-road, where a track crossed alongside a wood, resting the knee and talking of the universe, as young men will. Both were over six feet, and thin as rails; Ashurst pale, idealistic, full of absence; Garton queer, round-the-corner, knotted, curly, like some primeval beast. Both had a literary bent; neither ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... in each pupil; all the stars were in its blackness, and flashed; while round it for a horizon lay coiled an iris of the eternal twilight. What any eye IS, God only knows: her eyes must have been coming direct out of his own! the still face might be a primeval perfection; the live ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... body contained an adventurous spirit, and the delights of a bath in a beaver dam in the heart of a primeval forest appealed ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... to work at once as Uncle Richard fell back into his old way when he was a planter with a couple of hundred coolies under him, and acre after acre of primeval forest to clear before he could ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... in that one night they butchered, in cold blood, the families of some of the best men in the State. These cold blooded butcheries would have done credit to the most cruel and blood thirsty of the primeval savages of the forest. These deeds were heralded all over the North as "acts of God, done by the hands of men." The leader of this diabolical plan and his compeers were sainted by their followers and admirers, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... all this is evident; and a kind of Trinity is presented to us, viz. (1) The Female Principle and perhaps the primeval Darkness, needing impregnation or illumination ere the same can cause aught to be; (2) the Male Principle and Light, the First-born Son of Fire; and (3) Fire itself, the one origin of all things and Father ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... inflict mental and bodily anguish upon their fellow-creatures. This aptitude came to them in the growing complexity of their passions and the early refinement of their ingenuity. But it may safely be said that primeval man did not go to the trouble of inventing tortures. He was indolent and pure of heart. He brained his neighbour ferociously with a stone axe from necessity and without malice. The stupidest mind may invent a rankling phrase ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... directed their attention to those which afforded the most nutriment to man. Thus, in the lower level were to be found the cassavatree and the banana, that bountiful plant, which seems to have relieved man from the primeval curse—if it were not rather a blessing—of toiling for his sustenance.27 As the banana faded from the landscape, a good substitute was found in the maize, the great agricultural staple of both the northern and southern divisions of the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... in fact no action of created things that is not comprehended under this statement. It comprises the laws of physical nature and the action of physical causes, no less than the moral law and human acts. It is the one primeval law of the universe, antecedent to all actual creation, and co-eternal with God. And yet not necessary as God: for had God not decreed from all eternity to create—and He need not have decreed it—neither would He have ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Primeval Fear created Gods on earth when from the sky The lightning-flashes rent with flame the ramparts of the world, And smitten Athos blazed! Then, Phoebus, sinking to the earth, His course complete, and waning Luna, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... characteristics as the man who resides on the plains; or that he whose home is in the interior of a continent will have the same habits as the man whose home is on the islands of the sea. The denizen of the primeval forest will most naturally become a huntsman. The dweller on the extended plain, or fertile mountain slope, will lead a pastoral, or an agricultural life. Those who live on the margin of great rivers, or the borders of the sea, will "do business ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... quiescent palms, one ugly picture haunted me of the two women, the naked and the clad, locked in that hostile embrace. The harm done was probably not much, yet I could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt. The return to these primeval weapons, the vision of man's beastliness, of his ferality, shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost of battles. There are elements in our state and history which it is a pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to dwell ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... road stretched alluringly into the sunflecked shade of the grove. A hush like that of primeval day threw its uncanny influence over the world. Jim felt something tugging at his spirit that was unfamiliar, disquieting. He began to whistle just for company, and in a moment, as if at a signal call, Danny came along the path, sedately ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... stories of its beauty and fertility were not romances. Its heaven-reaching mountains, its immense plains of rich verdure on which flocks and herds might have fed by thousands, its splendor of deep forest and broad clear rushing rivers had a primeval majesty such as the first human creatures might have found on earth in the days of the Garden of Eden. The two boys traveled through forest and woodland when it was possible to leave the road. It was safe to thread a way among huge trees and tall ferns and young saplings. It was not always easy ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... she had succeeded eminently in leading her own life according to her own lights. The terror of appearing inconsistent excited her scorn. Appearances never troubled that unashamed soul. This is the magic, the peculiar fascination of her books. We find ourselves in the presence of a freshness, a primeval vigour which produces actually the effect of seeing new scenes, of facing a fresh climate. Her love of the soil, of flowers, and the sky, for whatever was young and unspoilt, seems to animate every page—even in her passages of rhetorical sentiment we never suspect ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... far to seek. The fact that an accurate census for Brazil does not exist is not surprising when we consider the enormous expanse of territory.[36] The greater part of this is but sparsely settled and largely covered with primeval forests. Official statistics, where they do exist are apt to have been carelessly compiled and often are entirely untrustworthy, "Paciencia," has been the watchword here as well as throughout all other walks ...
— The German Element in Brazil - Colonies and Dialect • Benjamin Franklin Schappelle
... times witnessing some most instructive operations of Nature: for generations the country has been depleted to swell the bloated population of the towns; and now the wastage of the cities is being sent back to the country to get a renewal of vigour at the primeval fountain ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... God's will that they should suffer the tyranny of one man—who have thought it their duty not even to hope for liberation. (Olof takes the volume and begins to read.) You shall hear complaints all the way from the primeval forests of Norrland down to the Sound. Out of the wreckage from the churches the King is building new castles for the nobility and new prisons for the people. You shall read how the King is bartering away law and justice by letting murderers escape their punishment ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... didst put to flight Primeval silence, when the morning stars, Exulting, shouted o'er the rising ball; O Thou! whose word from solid darkness struck That spark the sun, strike wisdom from my soul; My soul which flies to Thee, her trust, her treasure, As misers to ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... reached the conclusion, that all religions in their later stages exhibit a much lower conception of the Divinity than in their earlier form. It is only the hopelessly prejudiced who can say, as does John Fiske, that "to regard classic paganism as one of the degraded remnants of a primeval monotheism, is to sin against the canons of a sound inductive philosophy." Sinning against the consonant testimony of universal history is a venial offense, it would seem, when the integrity of this "sound inductive philosophy"—that is, of the Spencerian theory—is at ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... their horses, as far as may be and at some risk, not only their wounded but their dead; and of the {p.146} latter those that cannot be removed are concealed. The singularity of this point of honour, and the tenacity of its observance, seem more congruous to primeval than ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... Housekeeping is a woman's business. It is the primeval instinct at the bottom of every woman's heart. The average American and English home is a clean, sweet, sanitary and well-governed institution,—made and kept so by some woman. God made women to be wives, mothers and home-makers; and ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... name of some one that she knows. I know a father and five sons that have all been killed. Within fifty miles of one town that I know there is not a man under fifty years of age. There are ranches and farms that will go back to the primeval wilderness, the fences will rot and fall down, and the rabbits and kangaroos will overrun them again, because the men who were developing them are gone and there are none to take their places. Never was there a country so starved for men, and sixty thousand are ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... clothes, pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition, and phials innumerable, with money, stockings, prints, crucibles, bags, and boxes, were scattered on the floor in every place, as if the young chemist, in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to reconstruct the primeval chaos. The tables, and especially the carpet, were already stained with large spots of various hues, which frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical machine, an air pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... the wild birds that still haunt our remaining solitudes, the ruffed grouse—the pa'tridge of our younger days—is perhaps the wildest, the most alert, the most suggestive of the primeval wilderness that we have lost. You enter the woods from the hillside pasture, lounging a moment on the old gray fence to note the play of light and shadow on the birch bolls. Your eye lingers restfully on the wonderful mixture of soft colors ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... Maskull, opening his eyes wide. "Granted that you are a beautiful woman—we can't be quite so primeval." ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... round him, and especially if he should cast his thoughts to the high places out of the Senate. Nevertheless, he went back to Rome, ad annum urbis conditae, and found the fathers of the Federalists in the primeval aristocrats of that renowned city! He traced the flow of Federal blood down through successive ages and centuries, till he brought it into the veins of the American Tories, of whom, by the way, there were twenty in the Carolinas for one in Massachusetts. From the Tories he followed ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... successive tiers of the Atlas, and the dim and fantastic forms of the Numidian mountains. The immediate neighbourhood of the city was occupied by gardens, vineyards, corn-fields, and meadows, crossed or encircled here by noble avenues of trees or the remains of primeval forests, there by the clustering groves which wealth and luxury had created. This spacious plain, though level when compared with the northern heights by which the city was backed, and the peaks and crags which skirted the southern and western horizon, was discovered, as light and shadow travelled ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... get the impression that I think we are a nation of angels under a Government of earthy and primeval creatures. I do not. We are not in a Christian mood, and we don't want to be in a Christian mood. When last week a foolish schoolmaster took advantage of his august position to advocate Christianity at the end of the war, we frightened the life out of him, and he had to say ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... one of ethnology may appropriately serve for it, since it of all presents most attraction to him who is politely called the general reader, but who should in truth be called the man who reads the most for mere amusement. For Ethnology deals with such delightful material as primeval kumbo-cephalic skulls, and appears to her votaries arrayed, not in silk attire, but in strange fragments of leather from ancient Irish graves, or in cloth from Lacustrine villages. She glitters with ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... our house, on our Mount Clear, is an old oak, the apostle of the primeval forest. Once, when this place was all wildwood, the man who was seeking a spot for the location of the buildings of Phillips Academy climbed this oak, using it as a sort of green watchtower, from whence he might gain ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... It seemed to him that they loved and valued life more in prison than in freedom. What terrible agonies and privations some of them, the tramps for instance, had endured! Could they care so much for a ray of sunshine, for the primeval forest, the cold spring hidden away in some unseen spot, which the tramp had marked three years before, and longed to see again, as he might to see his sweetheart, dreaming of the green grass round it and the bird singing in the bush? As he went ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... open up tracks for the engineer and planter to exploit its vast resources. But Nature, unchecked by man, has been allowed too long to run riot there among its impenetrable forests. Never, perhaps, will it be entirely subdued. As with the primeval forest, so with the people. Mohammedanism, Christianity, modern education, have all tried their civilizing influences upon the West African, and nowhere, perhaps, with more success than in Sierra Leone. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... ninth; First, of Poysons, their primeval Origine from Minerals, and their accidental Generation in Vegetable and Animal Bodies, together with their differences; where 'tis discoursed, not only how Poysons may be bred in Men, but also, how the Poyfons of some Animals do infect and kill ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... to this viewpoint, that we begin to understand the mistake of ordinary opinion in identifying the hero with the soldier. Especially in this age of waxing militarism, it is well for us to note the fallacy which is involved in this primeval superstition. Heroism, at its truest and best, is spiritual. It is "an obedience," says Emerson, "to a secret impulse of an individual's character." It needs no other stimulus, hides in no gorgeous trappings, craves no companionship in ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... Diablo, the old volcano that towered high above this romantic and beautiful country of water and tule lands, steep hillsides and canons, rocky bluffs overhanging the straits. In spite of the faint discords that rose from the town and the slow tolling of the convent bell, it was a scene of lofty and primeval grandeur, a fit setting for the last earthly scene of a woman whose lines had been cast in the wilderness, but yet had found the calm and the strength and the peace of the old mountain, with its dead and ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... with him before the relentless march of the ice of the Glacial Age, to watch his advance in culture, to investigate whether there are any races of men now living which are the direct descendants of this primeval man. ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... Lost contains many more lines of poetic beauty than Homer's Iliad; and there is nothing in the latter poem of equal length, which will bear any comparison with the exquisite picture of the primeval innocence of our First Parents in his fourth book. Nevertheless, the Iliad is a more interesting poem than the Paradise Lost; and has produced and will produce a much more extensive impression on mankind. The reason is, that it is much fuller of event, is more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... unless he pulled up stakes and hiked out at once. And he didn't want to do that. He was enjoying a totally new sensation, that of householder. And he liked Eden Village with its big elms and shaded roads, its wide meadows and encircling green hills. It was all new and delightful after the bare, primeval grandeur of the mountains. Besides, and Wade laughed softly to himself, when all was said and done, he really wanted to meet her. The prospect brought a flutter to his heart and a pleasant excitement to his mind. He would probably fall in love ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... from any other ever made since man and man first began battling together in the dim twilights of the primeval. Not with shout and cheer did it rush forward, nor yet with venomous gases that gave the alarm, that choked, that strangled, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... down mingled with hail; the Tyrian train and the men of Troy, and the Dardanian boy of Venus' son scatter in fear, and seek shelter far over the fields. Streams pour from the hills. Dido and the Trojan captain take refuge in the same cavern. Primeval Earth and Juno the bridesmaid give the sign; fires flash out high in air, witnessing the union, and Nymphs cry aloud on the mountain-top. That day opened the gate of death and the springs of ill. For now Dido ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... rill that tinkled with a faint murmur among the stones, making a limpid pool here and there. Immense bowlders, draped with varied-hued mosses and lichens, were scattered about, where in ages past the melting glacier had left them. The trees that densely shaded the place seemed primeval in their ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... far ahead through this primeval stand of pine, sunshine glimmered, warning of a clearing. And here Trooper Lannis pulled in his horse at the edge of what seemed to be a broad, ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... and finally forgetting itself altogether in the sombre depths of shade. Then I said to my soul that it might have been a wood-road in the White Mountains, mouldering out of memory of the clearing where the young pines and birches had grown into good-sized trees since the giants of the primeval forest were slain and dragged out over ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... experience Obermann's is superficial, and Maurice de Guerin's a passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate feeling. Amiel indeed has neither the continuous romantic beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of Senancour. The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden solitude, its primeval silences and its hovering eagles, the Swiss landscape described in the "Fragment on the Ranz des Vaches," the summer moonlight on the Lake of Neufchatel—these various pictures are the work of one of the most finished artists in words that ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... glow of an Indian camp-fire. There was not a sound but the lapping of the waves, the roar of distant breakers. The great silver stars and the little green stars looked down upon a solitude that was almost primeval, yet mysteriously disturbed by the restless currents in the brain of a man who had little in ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... death-knell of modern civilization, of national prosperity, social morality, and domestic happiness! and would consign the race to a night of degradation and horror infinitely more appalling than a return to primeval barbarism." ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... grass growing between the stones of the streets, the budding of a tree strangled by its cast-iron cage, airless, earthless, on some bleak boulevard: a dog, a passing bird, the last relics of the beasts and birds that thronged the primeval world, which man has since destroyed: a whirling cloud of flies: the mysterious epidemic that raged through a whole district:—these were enough in the thick air of that human hothouse to bring the breath of the ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... ocean Did the Turtle swiftly go; Holding fast upon his shell Rode the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo. With a sad primeval motion Toward the sunset isles of Boshen Still the Turtle bore him well. Holding fast upon his shell, "Lady Jingly Jones, farewell!" Sang ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... ways,—had failed in impressiveness, in personal significance; had fallen at times below the level of the occasion, at others had overpowered it and swept it out of sight. Thane could have told him that it must be so. There was room for too many mourners in that primeval waste. Whose small special grief could make itself heard in that vast arid silence, the voice of which was God? God in nature, awful, inscrutable, alone, had gained a new meaning for Mr. Withers. Miles of desert, days ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... Dynasty. Of a prehistoric Egypt nothing was known, beyond a few flint flakes gathered here and there upon the desert plateaus, which might or might not tell of an age when the ancestors of the Pyramid-builders knew only the stone tools and weapons of the primeval savage. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... about the country or its inhabitants was to be had, so I fondly imagined that in such a land, secured from contamination by the wicked world outside, I should find a people of primeval innocence and simplicity, and the long-forgotten lines ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... while the digging went on. And, strange to say, though the earth had evidently not been disturbed for centuries, each object was found in succession, exactly as described, to a great depth; but not the treasure, though the well was sunk down to the primeval soil. It was all filled in again, and the mystery has never been solved. Yet the mere fact that everything was found except the gold, lends some possibility to the other stories of hidden wealth, told and repeated ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... separate cult of their own, less socially developed than the women, and make them an annual visit—a sort of wedding call. This is a condition known to have existed—here's just a survival. They've got some peculiarly isolated valley or tableland up there, and their primeval customs have survived. That's all there is ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... their own grounds and were equal strangers to [v]opulence and poverty. As they had almost all the conveniences of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns or cities in search of [v]superfluity. Remote from the polite, they still retained the [v]primeval simplicity of manners; and, frugal by habit, they scarce knew that temperance was a virtue. They wrought with cheerfulness on days of labor, but observed festivals as intervals of idleness and pleasure. They kept up the ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... pleasantness of our trip for the first twenty-four hours. There were some officers, old friends, among the passengers. We had plenty of books. The gentlemen read aloud occasionally, admired the solitary magnificence of the scenery around us, the primeval woods, or the vast expanse of water unenlivened by a single sail, and then betook themselves to their cigar, or their game of euchre, to ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie |
